By Kim Zarzour -YorkRegion.com
January 13, 2011
Local dignitaries got a hard-hat tour of the Thornhill Community Centre with Infrastructure Minister Bob Chiarelli Tuesday.
But they also got a hard-nosed partisan pitch for the Liberal party.
The community centre and library doors were opened to politicians for a peek at the reconstruction project, due to be complete by March.
After the tour, Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti praised Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty for working with the federal Tories to fund the project. “You are literally transforming our community and as mayor of Markham, I just want to say thank you very much.”
But amid the tour’s jovial ribbing and backslapping, Thornhill MPP Peter Shurman said there should be some fact-checking, too.
Minister Chiarelli praised the $6-million renovation of the library and community centre as one of the good-news stories to come out of the recent world recession.
Infrastructure stimulus projects, created to kick-start the economy, helped produce more than 2,300 jobs in York Region and 300,000 in Ontario, he said.
But Mr. Shurman, the Conservatives’ critic for economic trade and development, questioned Mr. Chiarelli’s facts, pointing to discrepancies in other figures recently quoted by the minister as he toured other infrastructure projects.
“He’s been throwing numbers around and then backing off,” Mr. Shurman said, alluding to controversy over facts quoted by the Ottawa media last week.
The former Ottawa mayor told a radio show host the province’s green energy deal with Samsung has created 18,000 jobs. In an interview the following day, he said the figure was really 16,000, then added the solid number was 10,000.
“He needs to get his facts and numbers straight,” Mr. Shurman said, adding the premier’s website links about 8,200 jobs to the act.
“I misspoke at 7:10 a.m. on the radio station ... and I subsequently corrected myself,” Mr. Chiarelli said. “I’d like (Mr. Shurman) to determine what, in his opinion, the number is. I used the number 10,000 jobs to date and he indicated the premier’s website referred to, I think, 9,000 jobs. If he wants to split hairs, OK, I’ll agree with him, 9,000. That’s a hell of a lot of jobs we’ve created.”
Mr. Chiarelli said his first tours of the province’s infrastructure projects were non-political, but that wasn’t the case this week’.
“A couple of people have thrown down the gauntlet and we can’t stand around letting people throw stones at us.”
He said the Tories invested $2.6 billion in infrastructure, on average, in the last three years of their administration while the Liberals have invested an average of $10 billion a year.
“So tell (Mr. Shurman) to bring it on. We’re happy to talk about the numbers.” The provincial Tories, he said, are defensive because they voted against stimulus funding.
“What Mr. Hudak voted against was how the Liberals spend money to no end,” Mr. Shurman countered by telephone Tuesday. “Ontario was in trouble before the worldwide recession and everyone else has recovered but Ontario has not.”
Tuesday’s tour unveiled a community centre still deep in the throes of construction with the ceilings removed because of an asbestos discovery, a section that was built as a rifle range in 1975 to be redesigned as a dance studio, a basement opened for more natural light to house increased senior and youth space, a fireside lounge upstairs and squash courts to include basketball hoops.
The facility, which has remained operational throughout construction that started last April, had 430,000 visitors in 2009 and almost one million items borrowed from its library.
It’s one of seven infrastructure projects underway in Markham.